Working families are being pushed into nasty rented property. That's the 'property boom' for you

George Osborne has warned that the UK property boom will last for a decade, due to the mismatch between demand and supply. Oh dear. This time round, there aren’t so many people cheering.

Remember the heady excitement of the first property bonanza, between 1998 and 2007, when prices were soaring and many ordinary people – looking at the startling valuation of their hitherto unremarkable house – gradually began to feel like folk of considerable substance, even surprise millionaires?

Remember the initial, innocent frenzy of “doing up” and “knocking through” and salivating over other people’s property purchases on television programmes? Or the coinage of that faintly ghastly phrase: “the wow factor”?

It was wonderful if you wanted to “downsize”, or sell and move abroad to live the high life somewhere cheaper, or make a killing by buying a wreck, doing it up, and flogging it off at twice the price.

But then, slowly, the headache kicked in: the boom was no good at all if you wanted to buy somewhere slightly bigger in the same neighbourhood, and found you had to shell out eye-watering sums for one extra bedroom. And it was terrible if you hadn’t yet got on that legendary piece of adult hardware – the housing ladder – the rungs of which became more intimidating by the day.

With the 2007 crash, the mania slowed down for a while. Now it’s back with a vengeance. In London, in particular, we’re right back in Crazytown, with prices rising by 11.6 per cent last year, partly fuelled by the government’s Help to Buy scheme, which provides state-backed mortgages for homes worth up to £600,000.

Still, there isn’t the same thrill. The anxiety is more intense. And the elephant in the drawing room has got even bigger: today 1.8 million households are on the waiting list for social housing.

In the 1970s social housing accounted for 30 per cent of all dwelling stock in the UK. Mrs Thatcher’s popular policy supporting the “right to buy” council homes – at a generous discount – created a new swathe of proud home-owners, but it also cut down the available social housing stock, which has diminished proportionally ever since.

With such extreme demand, priority now is often automatically allocated to vulnerable groups, such as those with a disability or mental health problems. Those getting squeezed out – and who are finding it difficult to survive financially – are precisely the working families on relatively low incomes who would once have packed out council estates. They are being pushed towards the lower end of the private rental sector, and finding dubious affordability and quality. They are being priced out of cities such as London, where they work: life is becoming an increasingly complicated struggle against ever higher obstacles.

In big cities with high property values, “right to buy” has led to some very complicated and costly situations indeed: a report last year published by the London Assembly member Tom Copley found that 36% of homes purchased under Right to Buy in London were being let by councils from private landlords. All the system had done in such cases was to create a new profiteer at the expense of the taxpayer. Yet between 2012 and 2013 there were 16,659 sales of social housing dwellings, an increase of 72 per cent on the year before. Meanwhile, there were 107,950 “affordable homes” built in that year: experts estimate that we needed 300,000 to help meet demand.

Does it make sense to sell off more and more social housing stock in the middle of an intensifying social housing crisis? I can’t see how it does.

In 1980, Michael Heseltine said: “There is in this country a deeply ingrained desire for home ownership.” Few would deny it, but Heseltine was in a very different UK from the one today, in which a first-time buyer without support has to take on staggering levels of debt to join the property-owners’ club.

By all means, build many more houses. But the price of ownership as it stands is too high for many, particularly in the South-East: there is now a deeply ingrained desire simply for a home of reasonable quality, with some guarantee of security.

Increasingly, that is not to be found in social housing, which is wildly undersupplied. It is not to be found in adequate private rented accommodation, which is beyond the reach of many on low incomes. And it is not to be found in the overheating housing market, which demands a king’s ransom for a shoebox. According to Shelter, the homelessness charity, the UK is now more polarised by housing wealth than at any time since the Victorian era.

Even those of us who climbed the ladder earlier, and might be deemed the lucky ones, can see a problem with this boom, Chancellor. It’s leaving too many people behind.